Know Thine Enemy
by Gary Fuckin' King
Summary: The cycle follows as it always has; stress leads to relapse, and relapse, to mistrust. All of a sudden, the growing trust between Sherlock and Joan is replaced by tension and anger, but the person he turns to instead for help may not have his best interest in mind. Rating is subject to change.
1. Preface Pt 1

**A/N: I started writing this in February, so it's rather incongruous to the finale, but I wanted to put it up then and I still do now, so, here it is. I had a different idea of who Moriarty was since I started this, and I love what actually happened, so I've decided I just want to use this as an alternate ending sort of thing to the season. Tales place, nowhere in particular, again because of the length of time it's taken to get this up. Lots of personal problems and such, to keep it brief. **

**To those following either or both of my other two pieces: I'm still writing them! No worries! :) **

**As per usual, reviews are always welcome; good, bad, whatever. I want them. **

**So, without further ado;**

Between the blanket of silence and stiff sheets of tension that burden this night, there is a growing layer of anger that is neither seen nor spoken but sensed by both of us. With my eyes fixed out the window, surveying the street, watching every person that walks within my view, I cannot see the expression on Joan's face but I know that it is one of near-disdain. Disgust, even. She's not pleased; she made that clear at dinner and has kept it so ever since. The telly is off and yet she has been staring at it since we got home. Even now, perched in the windowsill with my back turned to her as pointedly as I can make it, I know that she is sitting on the sofa, half glass of flat orange seltzer in her hand, eyes on the black box, as she knows now it is the only thing _actually_ worth her time to watch.

She knows. She knows I have not been entirely honest with her, that I have been shrinking away behind her back to occupy my mind, and essentially my veins, with the one thing that suspends my life above ultimate rock bottom. I've seen it coming. There's no reason at all this should be a surprise to me.

The dead quiet in the room is enough to battle the crawling sensation up my arms for the most unbearable feeling I have had all night, though the burning of every single pin prick on my arms when she called me out at dinner has to come in at a close third.

This is surely something I should have expected since the day I first caved in, in-what? 5 weeks now-plus an insufferable amount of time between hospitals and rehab…so why does it seem so surreal? Is it possible I had too much confidence in myself from the start? Or too little in _her? _Regardless, her reaction has tied a noose around my heart and as I watch her, completely motionless, it grows ever tighter.

Finally, sound.

"How long?"

"I'm sorry?"

In one choppy motion she snaps back in my direction and narrows a harrowing gaze on me. "It's too late for that, Sherlock," she deadpans. And it is. I know now I cannot win. In fact, I'm pretty sure I lost a long time ago.

"You do recall the gentleman who had his eyes shot out?"

"Jesus Christ!" She stands up and approaches the windowsill, and once she's reached it she sits down next to me, making no point in class or elegance as she often does, and folds her arms indignantly over her chest.

"Yes?"

"I am _extremely_ disappointed in you."

"I'm sorry, mum." To that, she gives my shoulder a hard shove against the wall of the outcropping behind me.

"Can you take anything seriously in your life at all? Just once?" Before I can answer, she turns away to join me in watching the activity on the streets below us. "I have half a mind to push you through this glass right now…teach you your goddamn lesson."

"I've got three quarters of a mind to jump." Perfectly manicured eyebrows arch over contemptuous eyes.

"Fine."

"Wait…really?" It's shocking, that she doesn't have a single thing to say. No therapist-explanation as to how those kinds of jokes aren't funny-or, if they aren't jokes, how that's not the way to handle things, etcetera etcetera-; no sharp retort to shut my mouth _'or she'll do it for me'_,…not even a single threat to run off and tell Daddy what I've done. Although she may have already done that; I can't be too sure about her sometimes.

She was getting up, but now she stops dead in her tracks, and centers a cold, hard gaze on me. "Your behavior is sickening, you know that? _I've had it._" Her arms fold across her chest again, but now isn't my time and this isn't my place to comment on that. This is the first time I've seen her truly angry, and to be fair, it's…uncomfortable. She really is hurt by this, and something tells me it's more than just professional. I go to say something, but she cuts off my attempt and continues. "I hope you're aware just how much work-on both of our parts-you've ruined with this. No-fuck that. How much work on _my_ part." A gesture of her hand near my face only serves to emphasize her point. For the first time tonight, no, for the first time _ever_, I really take a second to reflect. She has that effect on me; she can make me do and think things that would seem like fiction if anyone else tried. _She _brings out that hint of guilt in me. _She _was the first person to make an actual tear find its way out the corner of my eye. _She_ is everything the drugs are to me, everything damaging and healing…and yet _she _is the only thing in my life that I do not regret.

"Well," I begin, doing my best to fight the urge to come out with a remark on everything she just said seemed wrong or unfair, "I'm sorry you choose feel that way." She laughs; the kind of half-forced half-choked bitter laugh that makes a man's spine crumble and his blood burn beneath his skin.

"Just like you," she spits, and stands up, keeping her eyes locked on me although my own are averted well away from her. "Apologizing for what everyone does or feels-but not _yourself_, or what _you_ do, or all the _shit_ you cause!"

Silence. Long, dead, constricting silence.

"If I may point out, this hardly seem like the kind of thing you're actually being paid to do." As the words are leaving my mouth I can see her expression change, just in the portion of my peripheral vision that sees her.

And that's it.

If she had 'had it' before, by now she's seeing red. "You think you're the only one with problems?" she accuses, and sits back down, this time on my desk across from me. "Do you really believe you're the only person who's ever had a hard time in their life!?" With that rhetorical hanging in the air, she shrugs off the sweatshirt she's wearing and lets it fall to the floor. Shifting herself to sit cross-legged on the table, she tugs her somewhat-tight fitting shirt over her head and drops it on the jacket below her, baring a mess of scarring and evident grafts across her body. For a moment my words are genuinely stolen from my throat. Dark, angry marks stretch from her shoulder, halfway down to her elbow, where they meet perfectly untouched skin, save for a short line of whitish staple scars bridging them together. The entire corresponding side of her body, every bit of skin that had she lowered her arm would have been somewhat hidden, is that same dark shade, but rather than the evident graft of her arm there are layers upon layers of thin, tangled scars, dotted intermittently with darker flecks, what once were clearly slices that, left to their own, healed unevenly- improperly. "You think you're the only person in this goddamn world who's ever struggled with something in their life?" she asks me, wringing her hands in her lap. "Let me tell you about war."


	2. Preface Pt 2

**Thank you all for the kind reviews! **

**So, long story short, I didn't want to go too long without updating, so this chapter feels incomplete-I know. Think of it as, the last one prefaced this one, which prefaces what I hope to post by Saturday. **

**Confusing; I know. With shitty writing comes shitty planning. Whoops! **

**As always, my arms are open to reviews. **

We speak well into morning.

I feel a foreign kind of numbness as she describes to me the horrors she lived through that year. While I have never been so disillusioned as to believe that war is by any means a pleasant thing, now the concept is more than text and pictures and protests on street corners; it's tangible, sitting before me in sweat pants and a bra, recounting to me places and events I would never have pictured her in. The entire time, I find my gaze falling back to her side; a certain type of magnetism to what I least want to see draws more and more of my attention each time. My brain hears words like 'nail bomb' and 'raids', but my eyes do the rest, pairing each image in my brain with different aspects of the one before me. I see not the mental portrait of shrapnel wounds and nails jutting out of shredded flesh—I see the scars that once bore them, the taut, dark skin stapled to seal the bleeding gashes from projectiles of IED blasts. And while she was only a doctor, I trust she'd seen more than half the men on the front line. That much is visibly clear.

"There remains the matter, though, of how exactly you were involved in that blast."

"I'm sorry?" she asks me, bending down to pick her sweatshirt off the ground. I watch for a moment as she struggles to reach it, then gives up and settles to hug her arms a little tighter around her chest.

"Here," I sigh. Unsure of what compels me I ease myself off the window ledge and pick it up for her. She watches my expression as I rest the jacket around her shoulders. "What?" is my response to the puzzlement in her eyes.

"Nothing. Um, what was it you said I left out?" I want to ask what the face is for, I'm not going to entertain it any longer; her thoughts and suspicions are her own and I've already learned I cannot draw out what she wants to withhold.

"Why you weren't at your station when the bomb detonated."

"Easy. They couldn't move the guy. I had to go to him instead."

"I was under the impression that the field was not under your accountability."

"It was under my _jurisdiction._" Her tone is firm, defensive even. _That answers that, _I suppose.

"And you chose to go."

"I had to."

"Quite the contradictory statement, no? By definition, something under your jurisdiction would—"

"I don't expect you to understand," she interrupts with resignation in her tone. "I did what I had to do and I'm not about to try and justify that to someone who has trouble understanding basic emotions. No matter how I explain it to you you're not gonna come out of this conversation knowing why I made the choices I made, so just…just leave it alone, Sherlock, okay?" I pause in thought.

"Got it." She raises an eyebrow to question me. "Hippocratic Oath."

"I'm done." She glances at the clock with stone cold eyes, then back at me, and stands up, stretching the hours of stillness out of her stiff muscles. "It's quarter to five. Get some sleep, alright?" The necessity to point out to her that no, she's _not _my mother, and that, yes, I can make my own decisions, does present itself, but rather than say anything I simply nod and tell her to do the same. She'll try, she responds, which we both know means she won't sleep a minute.

I learn when I awake around 7:30 that she called Gregson not too long ago. "Because I don't want you on this case," she explains in a matter-of-fact tone with her back to me. I find it rather condescending—she doesn't have the decency to even look at me—focusing her attention on washing her breakfast plate as she stands at the sink instead.

"Is that your responsibility?" I lean back against the door frame; one ankle crosses the other and my arms mimic them over my chest.

"My _responsibility_," she emphasizes, "is keeping _you _off _that._" She turns the water off and pulls a dish towel off the stove handle. With the plate in her hand she motions toward the empty battery decoy on the table.

I release a breath I did not know I've been holding captive in my throat.

"You're careless," she continues, so I don't have to respond. "If you don't want me finding your stash, maybe the back of the fridge _isn't_ the best place." Her eyebrows arch again on the last words, as though disbelieving to my lack of judgment. I'd make more of a note on her tone, but my attention is, for a crucial moment, captivated by the way her hair whips across her face as she straightens up again, having just hung up the towel. I watch with slightly bated breath as she opens a cabinet to return her plate to the stack.

"What did- uh, Gregson say?" I compose myself quickly and while tension builds in my muscles, I keep my expression passive.

"He wants to see you."

"Did you tell him…what? I'm sorry—that was something completely apart from…" English. Completely apart from structured thought. Have I become such a mess over this already? "Uh, what did you tell him, rather?" I can tell that she's noted my falter, but still, she cracks neither a smile nor frown; her eyes withhold all feeling, and for the first time in a _long _time, she is solely professional.

My eyes fall again to the table, the hollow D-Cell Panasonic battery on the table. The perfect place to keep a considerable cocaine stash. Or, at least for the time being, it _was_. "All I told him was that you've hit a rough patch and need some time to get back on your feet. Even if I _could_ disclose the details, I'm not sure I would want to."

"Well, I thank you for that."

Then we fall silent.

It's a cold silence; steely, calculating. Tense and stiff yet pulsing with the harsh beating of my blood through my ears, the way her shallow breathing laps against my throbbing head like waves crashing onto brittle glass. Seconds passing on the clock drag by in claps of thunder and in that moment, I become conscious even of the feeling of my chest expanding with my own inhalation, burning, _searing _through my nerves and eyes like pins and needles until—

"Are you alright?" Reality crashes down and sifts through the debris left behind by my crumbling sense of reality.

Her hand is on my shoulder; she's standing close to me.

"I'm fine," I coolly pass it off. She doesn't believe me—her eyes remain concerned as she steps away—but she keeps to herself. Herself, and her reports, I'm sure.

"Come on, then. We've got to go." I nod watch as she picks my keys up off the table and gestures toward me with them. "Catch?"

"Toss 'em." The only reason they don't fall to the ground at my failed attempt to catch them is that the ring hooks around my finger. She laughs at me as she opens the door, and without justifying her sudden change in mood, leads the way to the car.


End file.
